Janet Yellen’s Harvard Speech

A reporter from our humor department has tried to find a talk on men and economics given in 2005 by Janet Yellen at Harvard Business School. But since there’s no sign of a transcript (or such a speech), here’s how our correspondent imagines it might have gone.

I’d like to thank Harvard for inviting me here today to speak about the issues of diversity that confront the world’s élite financial institutions. Now, there are many fields in which men are significantly overrepresented, but it is especially troubling in the case of economics for one reason: men are so bad at it.

Looking back at the many economic crises throughout history, the story is the same. For every failing bank, stock-market crash, or sovereign default, it is overwhelmingly men, old men, time and time again, making the mistakes that bring the world’s financial systems to the brink of complete collapse. There is nothing like the 50-50 split you would expect if men and women were equally inept at business decisions—not even 90-10. It’s as if men have an intrinsic aptitude for creating economic disaster. And, in fact, there are studies that support this unfortunate truth. I wish it wasn’t so, but these are the numbers—the facts—that we need to confront.

Is it fair for the system to keep these poor men trapped in the top cohort, setting them up for so much failure? No, no it is not. People tend to attribute things to pure achievement that are, in fact, not attributable to achievement. It is much easier for us to grab onto theories that put us in control of the patterns and circumstances of the world than to despair at the reality of our own individual insignificance in the face of centuries-old social structures. And so the human brain credits the promotions of these men to meritocracy when, really, it’s just pure dumb luck.

There may also be differences between little boys and little girls that bear on fiscal responsibility, and which aren’t just a product of socialization. While I would prefer to believe otherwise, my experience with my own son—who insisted on playing Monopoly highly leveraged and usually ended family game night by flipping the board over, screaming that the rules were stupid, and storming to his room—tells me something.

When there were next to no women in the business world, it was much easier to overlook the intrinsic male-ness of the failure to grasp the most rudimentary principles of economics which has led to the biggest financial crises of our time. I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong. I hope that one day a woman, for example, will make earth-shattering economic mistakes from a position as visible as the Federal chairmanship. Not that I think she would, but what do I know.

Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty.

Caitlin Kelly is a senior Web producer at newyorker.com and the editor of the Sporting Scene blog.